Top 20 Kant Quotes

For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.

Kant’s style is so heavy that after his pure reason, the reader longs for unreasonableness.

The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them.

The other aspect of idealism is the one which gives us our notion of the absolute Self. To it the first is only preparatory. This second aspect is the one which from Kant, until the present time, has formed the deeper problem of thought.

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant’s idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it’s an evolved machine that we carry with us.

The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

I had read Plato and Kant, but I had forgotten it.

Kant introduced the concept of the negative into philosophy. Would it not also be worthwhile to try to introduce the concept of the positive into philosophy?

Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help.

My conscience is informed by reason. It’s like Kant’s categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

Duty is for Kant the One and All. Out of the duty of gratitude, he claims, one has to defend and esteem the ancients; and only out of duty has he become a great man.

Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.

All praise to the masters indeed, but we too could produce a Kant or a Hugo.

The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.

You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.

Immanuel Kant famously claimed that ‘he who wills the ends wills the means,’ but he never spent much time in Washington.

Well, I don’t know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I’m no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.